Services

Online communities are easy to birth, but difficult to grow. We can help you understand what is needed to cultivate participation, attract and retain users, and create thriving online spaces that deliver measurable value. We have experience building and nourishing online communities for grantees, researchers, policy makers, and other diverse user groups. For more than a decade, we have published the Online Community Report, a leading trade publication, and hosted the "Online Community Summit," an annual convening of top thought leaders in the field of online community. We can help you develop online communities to support, learn from, collaborate with, and energize your high-priority audiences.

When looking at a big internet technology investment, most people wonder, "How can I be sure my organization gets the most out of all this money?" Contrary to popular belief, the biggest factor that determines success is the organizational dynamics, not the choice or design of the tools themselves. Adding good technology to an organization that isn't tuned for it will almost always result in poor outcomes. We can help you design and build an internet governance and organizational plan that ensures optimum processes for web management, effective web teams and reporting lines, skilled and motivated web staff, and a culture that values the internet and the operations behind it. We can also work with you over the long term to undertake organizational change management to implement the plan and ensure that you're ready for your next big technology investment.

We believe that the cornerstone of any effective web strategy or design initiative is thorough user research. To ensure user adoption, visitor retention, and audience satisfaction, you must have a finger on the pulse of your users. We've conducted thousands of user interviews, audience personas, surveys, focus groups, and usability studies to get to the core of what users want. We can help you understand your high-priority audiences' needs, behaviors, and preferences and how they impact your strategy planning and design decisions.

Our information architects (IAs) are whizzes at designing usable site layouts, coming up with intuitive categorization and taxonomies, and optimizing navigation design. Our goal? Make it easy for users to find the information they seek and put the organization's priority content in plain view. Like an architectural blueprint for a new building, our wireframes show essential page elements and navigation schemes. They are accompanied by detailed site maps that depict how the site's pages connect to each other. Together, these tools provide a framework for your site's layout and help inform smart visual design decisions. Our IAs are great problem solvers, so you'll be in good hands.

Our visual designers are committed to creating clean designs that will make an impact while complementing your brand. This is one of our favorite steps in the redesign process, as we find that clients are passionate about the "look & feel" of their product and are very enthusiastic about the visual design process. Enjoy the ride as we explore your design preferences, create moodboards or visual collages that hone the visual direction of the site, and ultimately produce design comps that bring your site to life.

Forum One helps large, complex organizations manage their information and social content using Drupal. We have been building open source web solutions for over fifteen years and have launched over 100 Drupal websites including numerous large-scale, enterprise-level solutions. We execute large, scripted content migrations, plan and respond to FISMA security requirements, adhere to Section 508 requirements, and deploy multi-site Drupal platforms. We specialize in complex technical architectures involving hundreds of content editors, thousands of community members, and tens of thousands of nodes. Our experience ranges from turn-key communities using Acquia Commons to customized online communities. We are leaders in the Drupal community, contributing custom modules, leading workshops at DrupalCon and local meetups, and proudly serving as an Acquia Enterprise Select Partner.

When it comes to aggregating, storing, and integrating your data for the web, we've got you covered. Whether it's XML, KML, RDF, or CSV, we have experience integrating your data with Drupal or your custom web application and putting it to work telling your story. And when it comes to data, nothing tells the story better than a picture. We create striking and compelling maps, graphs, mashups, and visual overlays to bring your most complex data sets and issues to life. We have experience creating dynamic and interactive visualizations to explain complicated topics, reveal subtle policy or demographic trends, localize news and information, and present alternate views of lengthy research or technical reports.

The launch of a web site or internet application marks not only the end of a project, but also the beginning of something exciting. Smart strategies and quality implementation provide a foundation for achieving your long-term online objectives. In order to help your site grow, we provide packages of services to build on the foundation we created during project implementation. We offer performance metrics monitoring, online and social media marketing, user experience and design assessments, technical enhancements, training, community management, web operations program management, and hosting. We have a package to suit varying budgets and ambitions. Let us help you increase your impact.

A major internet launch marks the beginning of ongoing web operations: that is, the activities that will monitor and manage online services and continue to develop the organization to make the most of them. We can support your transition from a discrete design and development project into a state of continuous improvement. We can join you for ongoing strategy discussions, provide ongoing assessments and feedback, help translate performance metrics into new initiatives, and implement the organizational change management that grows out of your governance and organizational plan. Let us help you transform your organization into a long-term success.

Every web site and internet application needs a safe and secure place to live. We pair our expertise with Rackspace's infrastructure and award-winning hosting support to provide you a superior, reliable solution. Our partnership delivers a unified solution with one point of contact and accountability—no more passing the blame! We do more than just guarantee server uptime—we manage your entire software solution, including security patches, while Rackspace's world-class engineers oversee your physical infrastructure, backups, and connectivity. Together, we provide coordinated system maintenance, 24 x 7 on-call site monitoring and support, backup and disaster recovery, guaranteed 100% network uptime, and two-hour hardware replacement. Trust us. Your site is safe in our hands.